Exploits

This page is a list of Cheats or Exploits found within the game, for those who have a passion for bending the rules. Warning! These Exploits may not be current, may break your game, and most of all stop you from the joy of playing the game like it was meant to be played!

Those exploits use what's believed to be bugs, as they cannot be explained by game mechanisms. As such, they are shunned by a vast majority of the playerbase, as they provide an "unfair" advantage that was not intended by the game developers.

Unusual behaviors caused by game mechanisms that may seem like exploits but are not are referenced in Unusual uses of Gameplay Mechanics.

Some of the underlying bugs are fixed by the Stock Bug Fix mod and cannot be reproduced when it's enabled.

Exploits in this page are roughly ordered according to their impact on the game.

No mess Polymer Press
Original thread

The Polymer Press outputs Steam and Plastic on the cell directly left of the building, one cell above the floor, when in regular orientation, and the cell directly right of the building with a reversed orientation,.

By placing a solid tile there, shown by (1) on the screnshot, Steam and Plastic are ejected one cell further, shown by (2) on the screenshot. This allows having the Steam and Plastic in a separate room from the Polymer Press.

By placing a solid tile on that second location (2), Steam is deleted, as it has nowhere to go. With a regular orientation, Plastic is stuck inside the solid tile, but in reversed orientation, like shown on the screenshot, Plastic is ejected one cell further, shown by (3) on the screenshot.



Pip planting in Flower Pots
Original thread

Pips planting can be abused to have Plants in Flower Pots. Those plants will grow at the Domesticated rate, without the need for solid fertilizer (but will still need irrigation, making this exploit a poor match for plants that requires irrigation).

To use this exploit:


 * Build Flower Pots. If you want to use Sand in the next step, do so under Sand tiles.
 * Entomb those flower pots in a natural tile. There are several ways, for example letting Sand fall over pots or cooking Algae debris into Dirt.
 * Make a Pip plant seeds.
 * Once you have a flower pot with a plant, you can copy its settings to other flower pots to propagate the exploit without repeating those steps. Digging up the natural tile is not required.
 * After copying the settings, you can remove the seed and plant another one.

Good candidates for this exploit are Mealwood, Dusk Cap, Wheezewort and Grubfruit Plant (Spaced Out!) because they don't require irrigation, require solid fertilizer and have a normal growth direction. Plants requiring irrigation can be used to eliminate solid fertilizer requirement, but they will have to be irrigated by Duplicants. The irrigation can be disabled by disabling the flower pot: Pips are able to plant in a disabled flower pot.

Pip unlimited planting
Original thread

Pips planting calculates where they are going to plant when they take a seed, and don't properly re-check all conditions when actually planting the seed.

This can be abused to make them plant in illegal tiles, or more importantly to make several Pips plants each a seed in the same tile, resulting in several plants overlapping on the same tile.



Liquid germs deletion
Bug report • Exploit example

By creating beads out of germy liquid (using a Liquid Vent with a Mesh Tile just below it), a significant amount of germs will be deleted from the liquid. By looping germy liquid through that contraption, germs will be quickly deleted.

For practical purpose, there is little advantage to this exploit compared to the intented mechanism of letting liquids sit in Reservoirs in a Chlorine environment.



Care Package duplication
Bug report

When a Care Package is selected in the Printing Pod, there is a slight window of time during the Care Package delivery animation when both the Care Package and the delivered item are present in the world.

By saving and reloading during that window, you will keep the already delivered item, but the Care Package will restart its animation, delivering a new copy of the item.

It can be chained by saving/reloading to deliver an infinite amount of the same item.

Give Duplicants unlimited skill points
Bug report • Original thread • Reproduction of the bug

By making a Super productive Duplicant excavate Neutronium, they have a 10% chance to mine it, despite Neutronium being Impenetrable.

When a Duplicant succeed, they will be rewarded with the maximal possible number of skill points.



Buildings internal storage heat manipulation
Bug report • Original thread

Buildings internal storage temperature sometimes set the wrong value to output elements just before pushing them to their pipe output, using the element previous temperature rather than the current temperature of element being converted.

This can be exploited for example on the Water Sieve, by feeding it a small amount of cold Water, then switching to hot Polluted Water. The output water for the converted polluted water will sometime have the previous cold water temperature, deleting a massive amount of heat.

It can also exploited the other way to heat up elements.

Other buildings known for exhibiting this issue are Desalinator and Oil Refinery.



Thermo Aquatuner/Regulator pulsing power-saving
Thermo Aquatuner and Thermo Regulator only need to be enabled and consume power when a liquid/gas packet pass through them to enable their cooling effect.

By designing a special timer sensor that's based on liquid/gas flow rather than actual time (since liquid and gas flow change when building pipes), it's possible to enable both buildings only when a packet pass through, to save on power. Using this, it's possible to use only a third of their normal power, about 400W for the Aquatuner (versus 1200W in normal operation) and about 80W for the Regulator (versus 240W in normal operation).

This special timer sensor is designed to work against a single liquid/gas packet being looped in a pipe with 3 pipe sections linking input and output of that pipe, with an Element or Temperature Sensor to detect when the packet is passing through, and only activate the Thermo Aquatuner/Regulator for a short time based on that.

Since this exploit is dependant on a precise timing, it might not work fully as expected depending on game performance.



Left-to-right liquid/gas flow heat transfer
Bug report

Liquids and Gases flowing from left to right don't properly calculate heat.

This can be exploited with liquids with a staircase going from left to right: any heat difference is going to be amplified. It's not as obvious nor as easy to exploit for gases.

This can be exploited both for cooling or heating:


 * For heating, input cold liquid at the top, and counterflow something hot.
 * For cooling, input hot liquid at the top, and counterflow something cold.

It can be exploited in a late-game Petroleum Boiler using Thermium: by making Crude Oil flow in a staircase counterflow heat exchanger, Crude Oil heating is amplified, which allows massive savings in heat required to boil the Crude into Petroleum.

Due to the nature of the bug, the effect drops off exponentially as the staircaise gets longer.

A high difference in temperature at each step is the key to exploit this bug efficiently.



Lavatory used without emptying Dupe bladder
Bug report • Exploit example

When interrupting a Duplicant going to a Lavatory, the Lavatory will be used, outputting more water than it uses, but the Duplicant bladder won't be emptied.

This can be exploited to create a lot of Polluted Water out nowhere by repeatedly interrupting a Duplicant going to relieve itself.



Tepidizer target temperature bypass
Bug report • Exploit example

There are two ways to trick the Liquid Tepidizer into working above their target temperature:


 * Pulse them on/off with a Timer Sensor.
 * Add a 400kg+ cell of liquid inside their target temperature zone check.

By using either method, you can get a Liquid Tepidizer to heat up to very high temperatures before a game reload.

After a game reload, there is a soft limit of 125°C after which the Tepidizer will only heat at 64kDTU/s, but you can still use the full 4064kDTU/s under 125°C to boil Salt Water and/or extract a very small amount of power using a Steam Turbine.



Solidifying liquids to debris temperature
Bug report • Power generation Exploit example • Cooling exploit example

When forcing a liquid to solidify on an existing debris, the resulting debris is automatically merged with the existing one, but only the existing debris temperature is kept.

This bug can be exploited for both heating (and thus power generation with a Steam Turbine) and cooling.



Liquid Duplication
Bug report • Exploit example

By dropping beads of a liquid on the same liquid, while a small quantity of another liquid above blocks it, you can duplicate a liquid.

With the exploit example, it can result in 2kg/s of liquid created for a power cost of 240W.